Overcoming Speech Blocks: Another Way To Say A Feared Word

I studied Coach Lee’s book and Skyped with him many times, learning and using most of his methods as described on WSSA’s website. All of this was incredibly helpful to me. During that process, I stumbled upon a crutch of my own, one that Coach Lee now calls “The Alex Twist.” It turned out to be the final straw that broke Satan Stuttering’s back. WSSA asked me to summarize my crutch in this blog, so here goes. The main reason I had speech blocks was that I felt I couldn’t connect the first sound of a feared word to the second. It felt like there was a block between the two sounds. Because I wanted to say the whole word fluently, I would wait until I felt ready to connect both sounds before even starting to speak.

So instead of waiting, I decided to say the first sound as if it were the only sound I planned to say, and then immediately afterward, I’d say the rest of the word. Almost every time, I was able to say the rest without a hitch.

For example, with my own name, sometimes I felt stuck connecting the “A” to the “lex.” I would wait until it felt possible to say both together. My twist was to simply say “A” on its own, and then say “lex” right after, almost like two separate words. Another example: to say “stutterer,” I’d say “Ssss…tutterer” — the dots representing a brief pause.

The result was virtually normal-sounding speech, with the first and second sounds only slightly slower than usual. Nobody even noticed what I was doing. After a while, I realized I didn’t need any kind of trick at all. I didn’t have to pretend the first sound was separate — I just had to ignore the invisible hurdle and start speaking anyway.

This may sound counterintuitive, because most people think of stuttering as something that happens to you, as if your speech gets involuntarily stuck. But for me, I discovered that stuttering was an imaginary condition — a trick of the subconscious. There was nothing actually stopping me from speaking. Even when I felt that invisible hurdle, if I simply chose to begin the word anyway, nothing got in my way.

The so-called hang-ups were completely voluntary. I was stopping myself because I had decided to stop.

John Harrison’s book Redefining Stuttering helped me understand what that invisible hurdle really was — a subconscious desire not to say a particular word. It’s the mind’s way of stopping speech when it senses we’re entering unsafe territory. For me, that unsafe feeling came from a fear of saying something inappropriate or revealing my social awkwardness and lack of street smarts. Interestingly, even before discovering this crutch, I noticed that once I improved my social confidence, my stuttering decreased on its own. Because I believed my blocks were involuntary, my subconscious kept using them as a safety mechanism. Whenever I felt a block coming, I’d stop speaking or try to break free with all kinds of tricks — facial contortions, swallowing, head jerks, filler words, clicking sounds, and so on. But I eventually realized there was nothing to break free from. That realization sealed the deal. My subconscious finally understood that it couldn’t fool me anymore, and the invisible hurdles stopped appearing.

It can be hard to grasp this until you’ve experienced it yourself, so I encourage others to keep using whatever crutch or combination of crutches works for you. Keep reading aloud, keep training your mind, and keep building fluency memories. Convince yourself that if you can say one word, anywhere, anytime, you can say any word, anywhere, anytime. Together with all the other WSSA methods, this realization led me to victory. By the time you read this, my Success Story will have joined the many others on WSSA’s site. WSSA is full of ex-stutterers who can help you.

I beat it. Now, it’s your turn.